Saint Augustine of Hippo (354–430) is generally considered one of the greatest Christian thinkers of all time. He was born in Thagaste (present-day Souq Ahras, Algeria) in Roman-ruled Africa, the son of a pagan father and a Christian mother (Saint Monica). After studying in Carthage and teaching rhetoric in his native city, he moved to Rome in 383 and to Milan in 384. Under the influence of his mother and Ambrose, bishop of Milan, he converted to Christianity in 387. He was ordained a priest in 391 and rose ...

This codex, entitled Livre de plusieurs choses (Book of different things), contains 120 poems in French. The title, now hardly visible, is on the upper cover of the manuscript. Comprising 252 extant paper leaves, it was compiled without any discernible structure or organization by a number of different scribes sometime between 1475 and 1500. The manuscript includes parts of the renowned Le Lais (Le Petit Testament) and Le Grand Testament of François Villon (1431−63) and is one of the principal sources of the former work. It also contains poems ...

This Latin woodcut map of Palestine is from the Rudimentum Novitiorum (A handbook for beginners), which is a history of the world published in Lübeck, Germany, in 1475 and contains what are considered to be the first printed maps. The map was printed by Lucas Brandis de Schass, and is based on an earlier map by Burchardus de Monte Sion (Burchard of Mount Zion), a 13th-century Dominican priest who traveled extensively through the Holy Land and the Middle East in 1274-84. The map is oriented with west at the bottom ...

This Haggadah Shel Pesach (Passover Haggadah) contains the Hebrew and Aramaic texts that are read and sung on the first evening and, in many households in the Diaspora, on the second evening of the Passover festival. These texts often are richly illuminated and decorated with miniatures. This manuscript from Tegernsee Abbey, a former Benedictine monastery located on the Tegernsee in Bavaria, contains 23 miniatures. The manuscript also contains a very polemical commentary in Latin from a Christian point of view, written in 1492 by the Dominican Erhardus, who clearly possessed ...

This magnificent manuscript was written by Leonhard Heff in Ratisbon (present-day Regensburg) and must have been produced — according to a note in the text — in or around 1476. Bound by the Ratisbon Black Friars, it later was transferred to the nearby Benedictine monastery of Saint Emmeram and from there to the Bavarian State Library. It contains the text of Speculum regiminis (Mirror of government) by Philippus de Bergamo (Giacomo Filippo Forèsti, 1434–1520), an Augustinian monk who was an expert on canon law, known for his great philosophical erudition, and ...

Block books are slim volumes, typically comprising 20 to 50 pages, produced by cutting text and images into wooden blocks (a process known as xylography). The production of block books reached its peak at a time when printing with metal letters (moveable type) was already established, around the 1460s–1470s. Worldwide only about 600 block book copies have survived, and they are among the rarest and most precious products of the printing press. The Bavarian State Library holds 40 of these books and eight fragments. Only a limited number of ...